Choosing simplicity

The Apostle Paul put it bluntly to the church he’d founded in Corinth, where false teachers were luring the members away from pure Christianity: “I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ” (II Corinthians 11:3 ). That warning is the Golden Text for this week’s Bible Lesson on “Adam and Fallen Man.” But there’s nothing simple-minded about the “simplicity” Paul recommends. The Contemporary English Version calls it “thinking about Christ in an honest and sincere way.”

The Responsive Reading outlines the choice we all have to make between false and true doctrine. First, it summarizes the Genesis allegory that the Apostle Paul refers to, where a talking snake seduces Adam’s wife, Eve, into disobeying God by eating fruit from the tree of good and evil. Then, returning to Paul’s words to the disobedient Corinthians, the Responsive Reading continues, “Let no man deceive himself. ... ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s” (I Corinthians 3:18, 23 ). And it closes with the climactic pronouncement from the first chapter of Genesis, that God has created man—“male and female”—in God’s own “image” (verse 27 ).

Section 1 explores the dichotomy between the disobedient “Adam,” made of dirt and manipulated by a lying snake, and the man made in God’s likeness, with “dominion ... over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:26 , citation 3). And what is it that helps you and me choose obedience over disobedience, and reconcile the differences between God’s man and Adam? In a word, it’s the Christ. “Through discernment of the spiritual opposite of materiality, even the way through Christ, Truth,” Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures explains, “man will reopen with the key of divine Science the gates of Paradise which human beliefs have closed, and will find himself unfallen, upright, pure, and free …” (Mary Baker Eddy, p. 171 , cit. 6).

It was Jesus’ life of preaching, teaching, and “healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people” (Matthew 4:23 , cit. 21) that showed the world how the Christ redeems the sinning race of Adam and reveals the pure and perfect man God created. As Bible scholar J. R. Dummelow explains in his remarks on this passage, Jesus understood and demonstrated “that pain, disease, and death are no part of God’s will for man. ... no part of His original plan of creation” (One Volume Bible Commentary, p. 635).

So the glorious news for humanity is that “the Science Jesus taught and lived” (Science and Health, p. 43 , cit. 25) in healing ailments of all kinds, is available today—through the teachings of Christian Science. And like the dyspeptic who learned that he could assert his “dominion” over all sorts of food (see Science and Health, p. 222 , cit. 27), you and I can find and defend our original innocence as sons and daughters of God. We can choose “the simplicity that is in Christ.”